:: it's a scary world: rants from a chemically imbalanced mind ::

:: Monday, October 22, 2007 ::

i'm torn. terribly torn. on the one hand, i think hilary is a bit of a wacko plus the fact that i don't know if america is ready for a female president (don't get me wrong - i'm fine with it. we could do worse. like the current administration. but that's for another time.) BUT on the OTHER hand.... we'd have bill back in the white house. and you KNOW she's going to go to him as a personal advisor. as long as he stays away from the interns. so it'll be as close to we can get to getting bill back in office. and i'm all about that. so yea. i'm torn. as natalie imbruglia would say. and i just think barack obama is just too young. for god's sake, he's only four years older than me!!!! so who do i vote for? a republican? sigh. god, i hope not. we'll see....

on to brighter news - my ipod is back! woohoo!!! unfortunately, it's not a brand new 80 gig classic. (one can hope). on the upside, it is my original pod with a new battery and a full checkup. and i'm quite happy with that. testing the new battery life now. started it playing at 9am this morning, locked it and it's been playing on autopilot ever since. it's seven twenty now and it's got just a liiiitttle battery life left. and i think that is QUITE acceptable for a full charge. because in all the testing that shows it as having a 12 hour battery life also specifies something to the effect of "Apple runs tests for battery life using songs encoded at 128-Kbps AAC and songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store (128-Kbps AAC). The songs are played continuously through a playlist without interruption, with backlight and equalizer off.". yea. something to that effect. and REALLY.. who rips their music at 128?? for music you aren't overly concerned about... for quick rips to make a copy for your mp3 playing car deck.... fine. but for music you care about? minimum 160K, preferably 192K. can the human ear hear the difference between 128 and 192? oh HELL yes it can. try it sometime. and who plays all their music via playlist so the system can look ahead and preload the next track in the buffer? me, i tend to hit shuffle songs and let it go. because in a perfect world, that is the ideal commercial free radio station for me. unfortunately i still run across some clunkers and wonder what the hell i was originally thinking. but i digress. yea. 10 1/2 hour battery life? yea, i can live with that. it's actually better than the original battery by about an hour or so. definitely better than the 4 hour charge it was holding at the end. not a scratch on it, just as polished and pristine as it was when i turned it in at best buy. color me impressed. and THIS is why i buy service plans. cost of service plan - 50 bucks. cost of replacing battery via official apple method - 65 bucks. cost of self replacing battery - approximately 30-40 bucks and countless scratches with a good chance of gouging the case getting it apart. i'm thinkin' the service plan was the wise choice. to quote indy III. AND i'm still covered under the warranty till december of 2008! BOOYAAA!

but as i've said recently, i've been pruning the library and recitifying some serious holes in the ipod/zune collection. (yes, i keep duplicate musical libraries on both decks. but i keep different videos on each one. though high fidelity is on both decks. i have a great love and respect for that movie.) in particular, i've been working on my zeppelin selection. i've always carried the entire zeppelin discography around. but i've decided i need the complete collection of page, plant and zeppelin. so i've been busy adding all 9 of robert plants albums, his page/plant unledded and walking into clarksdale, the alison krauss duet album, both cds by the firm, various official live led zeppelin discs, page's outrider and i'm in the midst of digging up page's show with the black crowes where they did mostly zep tunes, death wish II soundtrack, lucifer rising soundtrack and a couple of other page pieces. so far i've got 295 tracks in the playlist. (ok, i OCCASIONALLY use playlists, i admit) it amounts to about 25 hours of material. it's been playing all day on the ipod. ooohhh.. its playing carouselambra now... dammit where are my headphones. ah, screw it. but yea. i'm at a carry around library of about 22 gig in size, 4010 tracks roughly and about 8 gig of video. basically a 14 episode season of frisky dingo or south park and 2 or 3 additional movies. with a few odds and ends half hour episodes to round it off. so no matter where i am, i can be entertained. always a good thing. which reminds me that i need to put a pair of headphones in the car. cuz those i have at home, at work but not in the car. and you never know when you might wanna catch a south park ep. family guy kept me chuckling for two episodes last time i got my oil changed. which reminds me. i gotta get my oil changed this weekend. kind of important.

and as a sidenote - to the dood or doodette who left a comment on my last entry - thanks for the comments on the apocalypse! we see the rss feed numbers and the website stats so we know we have a listener base, small though it may be compared to keith and the girl (i LOVE those guys!!!) but its nice to actually hear from someone who is listening.... and yea, netflix is definitely throttling me. but that's ok. they're on the edge of losing another customer and i know their attrition rate is not where they'd like it to be. keep pissing customers off, boys.

the only reason i'm really keeping it at the moment is the daughter.. she's HARDCORE into johnny depp (ok, at least this obsession i can understand... never got her whole panic at the disco thing) and is deep in the midst of season four of 21 jump street. no, really. admittedly, i loved it when it originally aired. so it get why she digs it. i'm renting a disc or two for her each week since they never seem to have shit i'm looking for. the 3 at a time plan used to rock in the early days of dvd. we're talking late summer 98 when the decks were 700-800 a pop. (ok, netflix was actually a year or two later.) i was one of the first on the block with one thanks to fred. he managed to get me a promotional deck from his distributor and the rest was history. fred's store was the ONLY place in town to preorder dvds from. again, these are the "old" days of dvd. when there were less than 100 titles on dvd. first one i bought was fifth element. which was a mind number the first time after being used to vhs for years. and from there it snowballed. the current count? over 1000 discs. no bootlegs, no home burns. all originals. (never EVER look at your dvd collection and try to figure out the cost. it WILL depress you, trust me. unless you're one of those people who just doesn't buy dvds. in which case i say... i've got all these really cool movies to watch day and night and all you've got is that really cool money............ bastard. damn you.) and i can guarantee you i've traded or sold over 1000 more on top of that over the past 9 years. but it's so cool to be able to map large portions of your life via the movies you have. kind of like rob in high fidelity but he did it with his music. it's a very cool concept. some people collect snowglobes from places they've been. as roger miller would say, it takes all kinds to make a world. my GOD this is a book! didn't realize i'd been yapping this long. anything else i was in the mood to cover? hmmmm. nope. guess not. i'm off to watch lucy daughter of the devil and frisky dingo's latest episodes. then it's heroes at 9. though i seem to be having one of those days where i can't get motivated about tonight's ep. can't tell if it's my mood or if the show just isn't grabbing me by the balls like it did last year. ttfn.

:: Shaman 10/22/2007 07:20:00 PM [+] ::
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